Gender

There are three grammatical genders (rody) of nouns – masculine (mužský rod), feminine (ženský rod) and neuter (stredný rod).

Every noun has a gender – people, objects, animals, plants, properties. If you want to use a noun correctly, you have to know (to memorize) the correct gender. In many cases certain tendencies can help you to find the correct gender.

Determining the gender:

Masculine:

• the word ends in a hard consonant (pán - gentleman, potok - creek)
• the word ends in a soft or bilabial consonant (stroj – machine, lev – lion)
• according to the meaning (predseda - chairman, turista – tourist, muž – man, hrdina – hero, herec - actor)

Feminine:

• the word ends in a vowel -a (žena - woman, ulica - street)
• soft consonant (dlaň - palm, soľ - salt)

Neuter:

• the word ends in a vowel -o (mesto - city, auto - car)
• the word ends in a vowel -e (more - sea, pole - field)
• the word ends in a vowel -ie (vysvedčenie – certificate) - foreign loanwords ending in -on, -um (múzeum – museum)

Classification of consonants:

Hard consonants are: d, t, n, l g, k, h, ch
Soft consonants are: ď, ť, ň, ľ,dž, č, ž, š, dz, c, j
Bilabial consonants are: b, m pr, r, s, v, z, f

However, this may not work for all the nouns.